Pro Tip For Adding Scent To Your Soft Plastic Lures
- By: Tony Acevedo
- on
- Found In: Fishing Tips, *Tackle & Gear, WEEKLY NEWSLETTER: 10-18-20

The other day I was sitting in my kayak when I heard my favorite sound.
It was my reel singing to me, letting me know I had a big fish on.
But I was a little surprised because the rod was in my rod holder, and I had an artificial lure rigged on it.
How is it possible to catch a fish with a lure that needs an angler to put action on it when the rod was sitting stationary in my rod holder?
Scent.
Fish, especially redfish and black drum, use their sense of smell to find food, and since I was using a smelly Gulp jerk shad, I was able to catch this nice red deadsticking an artificial lure.
But what if you’re not using Gulp products?
Many lures have scent baked into them, or you can put a smelly gel, like Pro-Cure, on your lure before you cast it out.
But I’ve found there’s actually a better and easier way to spice up the scent on your lures that also keeps them from sticking together when it gets hot.
Check out this simple tip in the video below.
Pro Tip For Adding Scent To Your Soft Plastic Lures [VIDEO]
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Instead of putting Pro-Cure on each individual lure, you can put some in the whole bag and let it really soak into the lures.
This will save you time from having to get out the bottle each time you want to put some on a new lure, plus it’ll keep your lures from sticking together, even if it gets really hot out.
Have you tried this strategy?
Have any questions about it?
Let me know down in the comments.
And if you know someone who’s struggling to catch redfish and black drum, please TAG or SHARE this with them!
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Related articles:
- PRO-CURE REVIEW: WHEN & HOW TO USE IT, AND WHAT SPECIES TO USE IT FOR
- HOW TO CATCH BULL REDFISH ON ARTIFICIAL LURES (3 TIPS)
- TOP 3 FISHING LURES THAT CATCH BASS AND REDFISH
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In my experience scent is one of the controlled variables every angler should consider. Even the negative impacts of certain smells accompanying ones self and boat.
Smoking cigarettes while fishing will reduce the likelyhood of fish striking. They can smell the smoke smell off you, handling hook,line, and lure.
When painting a boat and taking it out while the product is still gassing off the boat.The fresh smell of oil based product on your boat will detour fish as well.
Before an angler considers positive scenting, they should reduce there capacity for negative scenting when on the water handling tackle.
When positive scenting I create ziplock baggies of organic material in conjunction with salt and oil (oil to help with scent extraction from the organic material).
Right now my favorite has been a bag of coffee grounds heavily salted. I simply let plastics soak in the bag, and return them to the bag when I’m done using them.
The smell of old coffee and salt flavor sets into the lures after a bit of time soaking.
Great info Doyle!
Being new to soft plastics, I have a couple of questions if you don’t mind? Are the coffee grounds used (ie:this morning’s pot of coffee), what kind of salt (kosher would be my guess), and the same question for oil, what kind? Vegetable oil, olive oil, grape seed oil, surely to heavens not motor oil (🤮 I would rather deal with the plastic smell). These things might seem like common sense to y’all and I apologize for not understanding the simplest of “obstructions”. Other than placing my soft plastics in a gallon size ziploc with a baking soda paste, I’m at a loss on how to remove that runner/plastic smell.
Easiest thing to do is grab some Dr. Juice from our shop page and spray some into your bag of soft plastics. You’ll never smell plastic again!
https://fishstrong.com/collections/scents/products/dr-juice-saltwater-slam-scents?variant=39318724247726
I call bull on the cigarette theory. I smoke all the time when I fish and do just fine.
ha! i’ve been doing this for years! glad to see others doing it too!
Good stuff Steve!
Thanks for this info Tony!
I’m looking for a fishing log that I can keep electronically, spreadsheet style. Do you have any recommendations?
My pleasure Mark!
I haven’t used one before, but I did a quick search on Google for “fishing log template” and there are quite a few out there you could download for free. Just a matter of which one suits you best!
Okay Tony I just dosed two of my three bags of SlamShadies, but will they be too slippery to bait the hooks with them? They are sliding all over the bag now so!
Good stuff! I don’t have any issue rigging them up.
Tony only you can catch a fish with an artificial hanging off the side of the kayak. Lol. I poured some of the excess gulp juice with my slam I figured it can’t hurt .
Haha it’s happened quite a few times using gulp baits.
If using gulp juice in your bags it can definitely help keep them slippery in the package, but gulp juice is water based and needs a material that it can be absorbed into for it to be effective. After a cast or two the juice will just come off of standard plastics. Only really works with Gulp baits.